


build to destroy

by helenecixous



Category: Rogue One: A Star Wars Story (2016), Star Wars - All Media Types
Genre: F/F, Fluff, Getting Together, Grief/Mourning, Multi, Non-Graphic Violence, OT3, Polyamory, dream team
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-01-04
Updated: 2018-01-04
Packaged: 2019-02-28 00:47:11
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 6,857
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/13260084
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/helenecixous/pseuds/helenecixous
Summary: She knows the hurt, she feels the hurt. She, too, had led people (friends) to their deaths. She knows it, and she feels it as surely and as viscerally as she can see Leia Organa in front of her. She can feel it in her bones as much as she can see the remains of the sunlight caught in Leia’s hair, she can feel it as surely as she would be able to reach out and touch the warmth of Leia’s skin.





	build to destroy

**Author's Note:**

> this is for martina ilysm im sorry it's taken so long
> 
> title from masters of war by bob dylan. give it a listen it'll make you cry

“Jyn? Jyn Erso, can you hear me? Squeeze my hand if you can hear me, Jyn.”

_ (the duty of the healthy, to repeat the names of the sick as many times as they can) _

Her fingers twitch around the solid warmth that she finds in her hand. She struggles to open her eyes, manages it for just long enough for the bright lights on the ceiling above her to cause pain to explode behind her eye sockets, and she can hear something high pitched and pained, something halfway between whimpers and gasping sobs. As she sinks back into this thing that feels like sleep, she realises that the sounds are coming from herself.

The next time she wakes up she knows that it’s nighttime. The lights have been dimmed and the world has taken on that muffled and muted quality that seems to only occur in the small and tentative hours of the new mornings. She feels like her mouth has been stuffed with cotton wool and salt, and there is a dull but persistent pounding in her head; the kind that makes her vision pulse and blur at the edges. She

_ (steady, steady) _

pulls herself into a sitting position and reaches for the glass of water standing on the bedside.

“Jyn.”

She starts, almost chokes on the water that’s in her mouth, and almost flings the glass toward the voice. Mothma is sitting in the gloomy half-darkness, and not counting the dark circles under her eyes and the slightly pallid tone of her skin, she looks as demure and composed as ever.

She offers a tired and wan smile, that for some reason Jyn does not want to return. She doesn’t know why, but the sight of Mothma here fills her with something white hot that tastes like fury, a kind of fury that she’s never experienced before. Mothma, seemingly oblivious to the way Jyn’s mind is racing at one hundred thoughts a minute, sits forward. “Do you know where you are?”

Jyn nods, watching the condensation slide down the glass and pool around her fingers, rather than looking up and at the other woman.

Mothma seems pleased, and then, “Do you remember where you  _ were?” _

Hesitation; she has to think. And then it’s as though she’s opened a door, a door so heavy that it takes most of her remaining strength and she can only sit back and watch as memories, and fragments of memories trickle back to her and bury themselves and their pain in her bones, her joints, into her very

_ (“your father would’ve been proud of you, Jyn”) _

soul.

“Cassian?” she asks, closing her eyes after she puts the glass down. Her voice sounds strange to her own ears, the words heavy on her tongue. And somehow, she knows the answers to the questions she has yet to ask, but she asks them anyway. “Bodhi? Chirrut? Baze?”

The silence that spins out between them is at once answer enough, and infuriatingly, heartbreakingly insufficient. She sucks in a long breath, her lungs rattling as she holds back her tears, or screams, or both. Instead, she opens her eyes, turns her head to face Mothma, (is glad to see her flinch), and asks, “Why me?”

 

She doesn’t know how they got her out. Mothma doesn’t know the specifics (or won’t say), and Jyn decides that she doesn’t want to know. She doesn’t want to know why they swooped in and plucked her from a beach of fire and couldn’t do the same for Cassian. She doesn’t want to know why he was expendable and she apparently wasn’t. She dreams of heat and cracking concrete and rumbles that sound like twenty thunderstorms meeting at once and exploding in fireworks of pain every night, and on the nights she doesn’t sleep she’s kept awake by pains in her hips and phantom shouts from her friends in her head.

 

“You told me that if I took you to my father you would see to it that I walk free,” she says to Mothma one morning. She stares up at the ceiling, doesn't turn to look at her - she knows that she's there. She’s always there.

“You can walk free as soon as you can walk again,” Mothma answers, and anger surges through Jyn like something white hot and poisonous. “We’re not forcing you to stay here. You just…  _ physically  _ can’t leave yet.”

“As soon as I can, I’m going,” Jyn says. Spits, really. She doesn’t want anybody here thinking that she’s staying, that she can believe in a movement that values one life above others. And, as if in protest to her words, her hips twinge and send rivers of fiery pain down her thighs to settle and bloom at her knees. She clenches her teeth, grimaces, and utters not a single decibel of pain or otherwise. Now that Mothma knows - now that she has been told - Jyn has nothing more to say to her. Of course, there is plenty she would  _ like  _ to say, but for now she needs to rest, and to not piss off the people who are in charge of the people who are in charge of her daily dosage of morphine.

She wants to be furious. She wants to be angry and not just when Mothma seems particularly blasé. She wants to loathe the rebellion for giving her a family and then snatching them all away in the same sentence. No, fuck sentence, the same  _ breath.  _ Her grief spreads through her every time she wakes up, as slow and as thick as as tar. It wraps itself around her heart and her lungs and chokes the breath out of her, chokes the life out of her so fiercely that she often believes that she will die. She will die, and the post mortem will reveal that ugly heavy blackness around her organs and in her blood, clogging up her veins and crushing her rib cage. And then they will know - then Mothma will  _ see  _ what Jyn has lost. Then they will all see what they took from her. And she wants to hate them for it; she wants to harness that old fury that kept her going since she saw her mother shot, but all that comes is sadness. All she can muster is a heartbreaking silence that sets fire to her bones and smolders there quietly, chewing her up and spitting her out and leaving her hunched over, broken, choking on her own tears.

Oblivious to this storm that’s brewing inside Jyn,

_ (is she really as ignorant to this as she would have you believe?) _

Mothma stands up and leaves. As she passes, her hand lingers on Jyn’s shoulder for just a second, and then she’s gone - going - until Jyn speaks and calls her back.

“Why didn’t you listen to me?” she asks, still staring straight up and at the ceiling. “Why didn’t you  _ listen?” _

_ Why didn’t  _ you  _ listen?  _ Mothma could ask.  _ Why did you go anyway? This pain you’re feeling, this grief, this sickness - it’s on  _ you. But instead, she just sits back down and looks at the side of Jyn’s face, at the terseness there. She inhales deeply, and considers her responses.

“If you and your fucking  _ council  _ had listened, we could’ve gone in with so much support, we could’ve planned it better, we could’ve done it with - with way fewer deaths. We could’ve been prepared, we could’ve been in and out before they even realised we were there. But you didn’t fight for it, you don’t  _ fight  _ for things - and why should you? You sit pretty at the head of tables and you go on and on and fucking  _ on  _ about ‘the cause’. You make people believe in it because there’s nothing else to fucking believe in, and then you send them off to die. You profess to care about these people, and I don’t know, maybe you do, but as soon as your precious council says fucking no, that’s it, you’re done. You didn’t fight for it - you didn’t fight for us when so many of us were here and fighting for  _ you.”  _ She stops, her chest heaving, her eyes shining with tears, her fingers curled into fists by her sides. “They died,” she says, and turns her head to look at Mothma’s tired face. “They  _ died.  _ And I should’ve died with them but I didn’t. They died because you weren’t willing to stand up for anything and risk upsetting the fucking apple cart.”

She tries to stop, and finds that she can’t. She imagines that her words are striking Mothma, drawing blood and leaving bruises. “And don’t you even  _ think  _ that it’s my fault, or theirs, for going anyway. You’ve seen what the Death Star does, and they knew it too. We had to go, especially because you lot had just given up.”

Mothma just nods along with Jyn’s tirade, flinching just slightly each time her voice raises. “Don’t think that this is the first time I’ve thought that, Jyn. And don’t think that you are even the first to point it out to me. I know you like to feel as though the entire world is against you, but a great number of people have already told me everything you just did. And we’re working on improvements to make sure that nothing in the future goes as badly wrong.” All of this is true, but it still hurts that she had managed to let them down so cataclysmically. She almost can’t tell whether she is relieved that they managed to extract Jyn - not for the anger. The anger she can live with - but for the hurt, for the way Jyn is hurting, for the way she probably always will. She doesn’t want her to live with what could have been. But so it goes, such is life; you can’t save everyone in a time of war - no matter how much you hate it, the fact remains as silent and solid and imposing as the Death Star itself.

 

It’s a good morning for Jyn. Her hips and legs are almost not hurting at all, and she’d woken with an appetite and breakfast had been good and the deaths of her friends aren’t the only thoughts and memories that keep her company. She’s managed to sit up and look out of the window and she’s pleased as punch to watch thick fog roll past trees and people and render her world mysterious, forgiving, and new - something to be unwrapped and explored again. She’s uncharacteristically optimistic today, like the fog will clear and reveal a new world, a new hope, as though there’s a force

_ (“i am one with the Force the Force is with me”) _

that’s stealthy, cloaked in the damp fog, that will take care of everything while the Rebellion sleeps.

The medical wing is quiet too. There aren’t many patients in anyway, and most of the ones who are in are sleeping and the ones who aren’t sleeping are reading or speaking in nothing much more than a murmur. Jyn closes her eyes, dares to feel something she doesn’t recognise. Something other than sadness or anger or emptiness, something nothing close to content but something that could maybe be, one day. She drains the glass of water on her bedside and is about to rest her eyes, to savour the absence of negativity, but the doors swing open and there’s a feeling of reverence that enters.

Jyn opens her eyes, pulls herself to sit up straighter, watches the group of people come in like fucking royalty, and-

“Is that-”

“It is.”

“Holy shit.”

“Why is she here?”

“Who is it?”

“You dolt, that’s-”

“It’s-”

“That’s Leia Organa. Here.”

“Why’s she here?”

“Shut the fuck up, she’s going to talk.”

“What does she want with Erso?”

“That’s  _ Leia Organa.” _

“Shut  _ up,  _ listen!”

Leia, Mothma, and some people Jyn has never seen before come to a stop at the foot of her bed. She struggles to sit ramrod straight, wishes that she has access to a fucking shower, wishes that she didn’t look as bad as she knows she must. For a long second, nobody says anything, and Jyn can feel the eyes of the seven other patients on her, all of them silently asking the same question that she would ask if she could stop staring at the princess and her fierceness and fumbling around for something witty to say.

Leia is watching her with unspeakable kindness in her eyes, and she is so beautiful, so ethereal (it’s cliché, she knows), that Jyn could cry. She feels something huge and light and hot rising and expanding in her, and Leia smiles, as though she knows.

“Thank you,” she says, and Jyn can hardly speak for her heart that’s trying to crawl up her throat in a desperate bid for freedom. It’s battering her ribcage, and she finally manages to swallow and clear her throat and reply.

“What for?”

_ (fuck she’s beautiful she’s so beautiful) _

“The plans to the Death Star. We  _ will  _ destroy it.” Leia sits on the edge of Jyn’s bed, and if Jyn had been paying attention to anything but the princess, she’d have seen the way Mon Mothma was smiling down at Leia with such a tenderness that Jyn would never have believed. “I know it’s no consolation,” Leia continues, “I know of the losses you’ve suffered. I wanted to tell you that we are so grateful, and you have been absolutely imperative to this Rebellion. If there is ever  _ anything  _ you need…” She leaves the offer hanging, unfinished but not unsaid. She reaches out and with one finger she tucks a lock of hair behind Jyn’s ear, and then she’s up and they’re gone and Jyn is  _ reeling. _

The doors swing shut behind them and a blanket of silence descends. Jyn can feel everyone’s gaze return to her, and she hopes that they assume that the burning of her cheeks is down to fury, and not the way her heart is suddenly racing and not the way she can’t think of anything but Leia’s eyes. She turns away to face the wall, and wills herself to calm down. She closes her eyes and tries to go down for a nap, and even as she shifts to get comfortable she knows that she is now staying. She has to stay, she has to fight, to be thanked like that again. And besides, she has a favour she intends to call in eventually. She _ will _ see Leia again.

 

The thing about Mothma, Jyn learns, is that she is nothing if not persistent. Jyn’s been up for a few days, allowed and advised to go to physiotherapy twice a day, and while she hates the staff and she hates being patronised and she hates having to move so so so  _ so  _ slowly, she is indescribably glad to be out of that fucking hospital bed and away from those four walls.

But she can also see through Mothma and her thinly veiled excuses to be around the physiotherapy rooms - “I needed to check in with…” “I just needed to grab…” “Have you seen…” - she knows that Mothma is around to talk to her. It’s just that Jyn has nothing to say.

Each time Mothma comes in, Jyn looks up, permits herself to search for Leia, and when she’s not there (she never does seem to be), Jyn looks down and when Mothma appears in front of her, she refuses to say much and hopes that Mothma will go away.

It takes about a week for conversation to happen, and it's only because Mothma comes armed with a steaming cup of coffee that, once she takes a sip, Jyn is almost convinced her father used to drink the very same kind (if she's not misremembering, and that's possible).

“Thank you,” she says, coming to a stop and looking at Mothma evenly.

“I thought you would appreciate it. They would hang me if I tried bringing coffee into the hospital.”

“Would that have made so much difference?” Jyn asks before she can stop herself, but she is pleased that Mothma only smiles, and shrugs.

“You don't think I do very much around here, do you? Perhaps in time you will come to see differently.”

Jyn says nothing, stuck now between a rock and a hard place; for she doesn't want to agree, she doesn't want to  _ soften _ , but she also doesn't want to upset Mothma anymore. So she opts for silence and settles instead for figuring out where her bite has gone, and whether or not she'll be able to get it back.

 

She finds out where Mothma acquired the coffee and gets some for herself, and that night when she's back in her own bunker she dreams - not of Chirrut and Baze and Cassian - but of Mothma. It's disjointed and fragmented but there is softness, and gloom, and a fingertip tracing her jawline and lips brushing over her neck and then there's fever and hunger and desperation and she's climbing and climbing, and then she's awake, her cheeks are burning, and she hopes to high fucking heavens that nobody had been passing close enough to hear anything.

And that morning, as she permits herself a walk around the base, she allows herself to think. She is embarrassed, sure, because there is no way that Mothma is anything but straight, and there's bound to be some dead husband or lost love in her past that would mean she would quite possibly punch the head from the shoulders of anybody stupid enough to make any kind of presumptive advance. But still she can't bring herself to stop thinking of Mothma’s jawline, her eyes, and then she's thinking of Leia’s eyes and her smile and she's momentarily overcome by a forcive feeling that feels visceral. She stops, trembling, and has to steady herself as her fingers twitch and she realises that she would fight - god would she  _ fight _ a thousand battles for what she's feeling, she would fight a thousand battles and then some to keep Leia and Mothma safe. She would kill to keep their white robes white, she would never put a blaster down again if it meant she could see Leia smile, if she could be close enough to Mothma to catch some of her warmth.

“Erso!”

She turns, trying to cling to that fantastic weight in her chest, bites back tears as it disperses slowly, loosens its grasp on her and recedes.

“What?” she snaps, and the man who is walking toward her rolls his eyes.

“You need to deliver this to Mon Mothma.” He's holding out a thick envelope. “Now, Erso.”

“What am I, a slave?” she asks, forcing herself to not snatch the envelope from him eagerly.

“Just do it and stop being a wiseass. They may think you're a hero but to everyone else you're just a brat whose entire squad died. You're just the one that survived.” His wrist twitches. “Take it and give it to her. Don't fucking open it - it's confidential.  _ Obviously. _ And try not to get anybody killed.”

“Fuck you,” she spits, and takes it from him. “I'm not a slave, tell whoever gave this to you that-”

“That you're not even supposed to be here?” he fills in. “Yeah. Got it. Now go. She's in her quarters.”

She glares at him, itches to smack him down, but the envelope is heavy and it feels important and she focuses on the fibers beneath her fingertips. “Fuck you,” she repeats, and then she's turning away and leaving him alone.

She hurries as best she can, tells herself that she just knows that whatever it is she has in her hand is important and that she's not eager to see Mothma again. She also refuses to let herself admit that she's curious because she still  _ really  _ doesn't want to be involved in this fucking rebellion. By the time she's calmed her head, she's knocking once on Mothma's door and letting herself in and she's half way through saying  _ something  _ when her eyes adjust to the low light and she freezes in her tracks.

Leia is laying across the bed in the room, and Jyn’s cheeks are on  _ fire  _ as she realises that Leia’s hair is down and that it is the only thing stopping her from being totally exposed.

“I- God, I'm sorry-”

Leia is watching her, a small smile on her face, and she does nothing to cover herself. Another quick glance lets Jyn know that the low light is due to the candles that are lit, and then she sees Mothma in a loose robe. She's sitting by an open window, a lit cigarette between her fingers, and her hair is mussed and her eyes are dark and Jyn wants to die.

“I'll, I'll come back, uh, later, I'm sorry I didn't-” she's backing out of the room, trying to look nowhere and wanting to look at nothing but the two of them. “I'm sorry, I'll just leave this outside, I'm sorry they said it was urgent, God, I'm- I'm sorry-” The door shuts behind her and she leaves the envelope half under it and then she's leaving, reeling, blushing, her stomach doing things that she's sure stomachs just shouldn't do.

 

That night she goes to sleep thinking about Mothma, and wakes up shaking and sweating and thinking about the Death Star and Bodhi. She throws her blanket off her and gets out of bed, spends a while pacing and trying to get her heart to stop clenching

_ (“i am one with the Force the Force is with me”) _

before she wrenches her door open and heads to the gym. The night is still thick and heavy and there is not much movement around the rebel base - she manages to slip under the cover of darkness and get there without anyone apprehending her and making her go back to bed. Her hips and legs are still not good, but she straddles a bench and lifts weights until her arms are trembling and she can feel sweat trickling down her back. It works to distract her from her nightmare and soon she is thinking of Leia and then she is lifting heavier weights with renewed vigour. She focuses on the way her muscles strain and spasm when she relaxes, and on the way she doesn't feel so alone anymore. She focuses on the deep brown of Leia’s eyes and the gentle quirk of Mothma's lips just before she smiles, on the way they look at each other, on the way they both look at  _ her,  _ and it makes her want to be so much better. It makes her want to be stronger than she's ever been, and kinder, and angrier. They make her want to feel worthy of their attention.

 

“You've been working out,” Mothma says at physiotherapy.

Jyn pauses, looks at her, and smiles. “You noticed?” she asks, flexing her arm.

Mothma smirks over the rim of her coffee cup. “Nothing happens at this base without my knowing. Nothing keeps happening here without my say so. You thought your regular little late night excursions would go by unnoticed, Erso?”

“You run a tight fucking ship,” Jyn grumbles, sitting next to her and picking up her coffee. “How long’ve you known for?”

“Long enough.”

“What a typical non-answer.”

Mothma just smiles again and leans back, settling into the chair, and neither of them speak for a while. They watch people around them shuffling along, trying to train their own legs to work again; in the corner there sits a man who Jyn had never seen before, who is staring at his hand as his fingers jerkily work a rubber ball between them. It’s quiet, and Mothma’s leg is brushing against Jyn’s, and Jyn is surrounded by the soft and unimposing scent of Mothma’s perfume, of the coffee that is steaming in her hands, and by the midday sun that is pouring through the high windows and making pale puddles on the floor. All of this, and all Jyn wants to ask, all she wants Mothma to explain, all she wants to _know_ is what's going on between her and Leia, but by the time she has even half formulated the words in a respectable order, the doors hiss open and Leia sweeps in.

Mothma glances at Jyn and smirks before she stands up, casts a quick look around to make sure nobody is watching as she lets her hand rest on Leia's hip and whispers something in her ear. Leia laughs suddenly, her cheeks flushing, and she murmurs something back. She reaches up and her fingers gently touch Mothma’s hair, and the tenderness between them, the way they are looking at each other, makes time stop and Jyn’s lungs start collapsing in on themselves. She is reminded of Chirrut and Baze, and how they watched each other, and of Bodhi, and the way he trusted so openly and freely and without fear of betrayal. She wonders, briefly, what it would be like to feel so completely whole, and realises that she wants what they have. She wants what they have and she wants it with them - she wants to simply cease existing, and to become the air between them, the space between their lips, she wants to be in the water they drink and she wants to be the warmth that they feel. She wants to be in each smile, each laugh, each whisper, each kiss, so much so that it makes her ache. She catches herself staring and looks away quickly, her cheeks flushing, and she busies herself finishing her coffee and standing, planning to slip away unnoticed.

Mothma turns and smiles at her, and both she and Leia incline their heads at Jyn before they leave together, and if Jyn were to look closely, she would have seen their fingers brushing and then tentatively linking as they left.

 

That night, Jyn finds herself in the food hall, dismally prodding her broth with a spoon, pushing it around and around the rim of the bowl. The sun had long since disappeared, leaving in its wake thick black clouds and a fine, cold mist that eventually gave way to heavy rain that is battering the roof of the base and making it near impossible for anybody to speak. She’s thinking about Cassian again, and trying desperately to think of something else, but Cassian turns into K-2SO and K-2SO turns into Bodhi and Bodhi to Chirrut and Chirrut to Baze and Baze to everybody else, every other unnamed rebel, every other  _ person  _ who had died for what? For this? For the  _ cause?  _ Her insides twist and she blinks back tears stubbornly, and is about to take a mouthful of the foul looking broth when the man who had handed her the envelope to deliver to Mothma sits down heavily beside her with his two friends. They ignore her, and she ignores them, and tries to focus on the sound of the rain, and it works - for a while.

Her attention is pulled toward them when she hears the words ‘Mothma’, and ‘dyke’. She turns, frowning, her broth forgotten. “What?” she asks, loudly over the sound of the relentless rain.

“Mothma’s a fucking dyke,” he tells her, leaning close so she can hear him. “Her and the princess are screwing. It’s a waste of perfectly good tits, if you ask me.”

“I didn’t.”

He laughs, and turns back to his friends, oblivious to the way Jyn’s blood is boiling. “One night with me and that princess would be singing a different tune,” he’s saying. “I’d make her scream it.” He grins at his friends and makes crude gestures, and Jyn can’t hear or see anything but him, and can’t think of anything other than the seven different ways she could make him cry.

They take turns describing to each other what they would do to Leia, they rhapsodise and theorise about what she sees in Mothma, and when the asshole next to her starts talking about how much he wants to fuck her while Mothma watched, Jyn shoves her seat back and stands up. She’s in a blind rage, she knows that, but all she can feel is her knuckles meeting his face, over and over again. She’s vaguely aware that she had somehow knocked him from his chair and had straddled him, and she can hear shouts but they’re far away and they don’t concern her. There’s blood on her hands and she can feel her hips protesting, and her knuckles feel like they’re fracturing, splintering, breaking under the rain of punches she’s dealing him.

Somebody grabs her and hauls her off of him, and then his friends enter her field of vision and there’s a sudden, burning pain in her abdomen that knocks the wind from her. She’s bent double, held from behind by whoever grabbed her, and then someone punches her and her vision swims. There’s so much shouting, she can taste blood, and when the next hit comes her legs buckle and everything is black.

 

“Hello.”

Jyn groans, prying her eyes open and raising her fingertips tentatively to her forehead. “Fuck.”

Mothma sits back and smiles, and after the pain the first thing Jyn notices is the bright sunlight that's colouring the room golden.

“Will you ever not be rash?”

“I've got a rash?”

Mothma laughs. “You fractured Jameson’s face in seven different places. Two of your ribs are broken, your spleen was bleeding so they had to remove it. They also noticed your appendix was inflamed so they took that too. Your knuckles are broken and so is your jaw, but for you against three men double your size… I'm impressed.” Her smile twists, and she fights to maintain it. Jyn can see the strain behind her eyes.

“It was raining.” she winces as she remembers. “So… Do I need to leave?”

Mothma blinks at her. “Leave?” she asks.

“I beat a guy to hell, I'm assuming there's punishment.”

“You beat a  _ bigot  _ to hell. There's no punishment for that. Not on my watch.”

“They tell you what happened?”

Mothma nods. “Yes.”

“Alright.”

She leans forward, rests her arms on her knees as she watches Jyn intently. “Did you put yourself in that position on purpose?” she asks. “Did you calculate the risks of going against three of them by yourself?”

“No. I reacted.”

“You're reckless, and dangerous, and stupid. That's twice you've almost gone and got yourself killed. Not counting all the times you must have done before you got thrown into this life.”

Jyn studies her. “So now you're angry with me?” she asks. “You're angry because I got into a fight? Jesus, do you do  _ anything  _ but give out orders? Have you ever actually stood up for anything you love?”

“ _ What  _ do you love, Jyn? What is it that you love, aside from making moronic decisions, endangering yourself, and fighting authority at  _ every  _ turn?”

Jyn bites her tongue, and stares at the ceiling.

“You got those plans when we didn't ask you to. You got them when we explicitly told you  _ not  _ to. It's not a bad thing, Jyn, you use this energy to do good things. It's just hard... to watch you do it.” Mothma's tone is gentle now, and to Jyn’s surprise it makes her want to weep. “Do you realise how important you are to m- to the Rebellion? If we lost you, there would be so little hope left.”

Now Jyn looks at her. “You love Leia,” she says. “You'd fight for her. You are fighting for her, right?”

Mothma says nothing and watches Jyn evenly.

“Everything you do here… it’s for her. And it didn’t start out that way, did it? You fell in love with the cause and then you fell in love with her and it became about her. It became about love.” Jyn pauses. “She taught you that there’s more, didn’t she? She gave you something to hold on to, and something to lose. You fell in love with her love and her life.”

“She taught me a lot.”

“She taught you loss.”

“Cassian taught you loss.”

“Cassian and Chirrut and Baze and Bodhi. And my mother, my father.”

“Leia showed me strength. She showed me how to fight when my world had ended. She gave me something else, with her power and her hope and her losses and…” Mothma stops, and rubs the back of her neck. “She’s so strong, Jyn. She’s so strong, and she’s faced so much. I’ve never met anyone who loves so faithfully. She’s why I’m here, you’re right.”

Jyn smiles, and thinks of how she knows how Mothma feels. She too would fight, would stay, would hope to high heavens if she had that kind of security and risk. “I’m glad you have it,” she finally says.

“But she’s why you’ve stayed too, no?”

Jyn blushes, and is saved from having to weakly deny it when the doors open and Leia comes in alone. She reaches Jyn’s bedside and her smile is wide and her relief is untamed.

“You’re awake,” she says, reaching out and brushing Jyn’s hair from her forehead. “You’re awake.”

“It takes more than some morons to take me out,” Jyn says, with a gusto that sounds vaguely embarrassing to her own ears. She smiles. “Takes more than a couple of shitty men and their shitty conversations to keep me from this rebellion. I’ve taken down stormtroopers, I’ve taken down droids, armies of droids, I’d take down Darth Vader himself if I had half the chance. Just give me the chance and I’ll show you. I’ll be the horror story stormtroopers tell their baby stormtroopers to make them behave and go to bed on time, with their shitty baby stormtrooper helmets.”

Mothma hides a smile behind her hand, and Jyn closes her eyes and thanks the stars that she’d be able to blame that particular bout of word vomit on the morphine. But Leia laughs, and in that moment with the rich sunlight and the way Mothma’s eyes are shining and the sound of Leia’s laugh, it's enough. It’s enough to see Jyn through her second period of healing, it’s enough to keep her from going mad, it’s enough to keep her nightmares at bay and her emotions under control.

 

“Erso? There’s someone here for you.”

Jyn looks up from the book she’s reading. A guard is standing by the door, and briefly Jyn wonders why someone who needs to be announced is coming to see her. And then, of course, Leia appears. There’s a cluster of guards standing a few feet behind her, and she motions with her hand to let them know it’s okay, they can stand back, she’s safe.

Jyn gets to her feet, puts the book down on the bench she was sitting on.

“Walk with me?” Leia asks.

Together they walk a while outside in silence, Jyn’s heart racing as she steals glances at Leia’s face. Eventually, the quiet becomes too much to bear and Jyn clears her throat. “Is there something wrong?” she asks.

Leia shakes her head, and they come to a stop and lean against the railings. The princess looks out to the sunset, and contemplates what she wants to say.

“Things are… bad,” she says after a moment. “They’re bad. They’re getting worse, and they will get better. They will. But for now…”

Jyn nods.

“Don’t say anything, please. It’s all so complicated, people are dying. We’re losing allies left and right. They’re dying, or hiding, or giving up. We’ve lost so many good, decent, hardworking people.” She turns to look at Jyn. “But you know that better than anybody. You don’t need me telling you this.”

“I-”

“Please,” Leia interrupts. “Let me finish.”

Jyn nods again, biting her lip.

“Mon Mothma has been here through everything. From the start. She’s watching the alliance crumble, she’s sent people to their deaths, she’s done so much and she’s been so hurt. She’s been so strong. She really cares about you, Jyn. She cares about you and it hurts her so much. She didn’t leave your side when you were brought back, she ate and slept on that chair, she cried each time you had a nightmare. I tried to be there for her and to help her but the guilt was eating her alive. If you hadn’t made it…” She trails off, and shakes her head. “I need you to look out for her, by looking out for yourself. It’s not just brawling that gets things done around here.”

“I know,” Jyn says quietly. And she does. She knows now, suddenly, the weight of Mothma’s job, the powerlessness of being a politician in the middle of a war. She knows the hurt, she  _ feels  _ the hurt. She, too, had led people (friends) to their deaths. She knows it, and she feels it as surely and as viscerally as she can see Leia Organa in front of her. She can feel it in her bones as much as she can see the remains of the sunlight caught in Leia’s hair, she can feel it as surely as she would be able to reach out and touch the warmth of Leia’s skin. “I used to think she did nothing. I used to think she sat in her chambers and sent people off, I never considered that she would… that she would care. That it would hurt.”

“This rebellion would crumble without her,” Leia says, and there’s a trace of bitterness in her voice. “We all have a choice, and it’s not whether or not we should fight. We all need to fight. But we also need to love. We need to choose love. And it’s the most dangerous choice of all.”

Jyn inhales shakily, and Leia smiles gently.

“I need to go,” she says. “I’ll be back, though. Soon. I just need you to look out for her. And I need you to not make her spend any more time in that hospital. I need you to go easy on her.” She pauses, and reaches out to tuck Jyn’s hair behind her ear gently. “Could you do that?”

“Yeah,” Jyn says softly. “Yeah, I imagine I could do that.” She looks at Leia evenly, trying to make her see how much she means this. “Leia-”

“I know.” Leia smiles, and leans forward just slightly. “You love her, I know.”

There’s a heavy second of silence, and then Mothma appears behind them. She’s smiling but it’s so sad and so worried that Jyn’s heart breaks for her. It breaks for them all. Mothma’s hand rests on Leia’s waist, and her other one finds Jyn’s left hand and squeezes tightly, and tears spring to Jyn’s eyes and she smiles, just a little, her breath catching and her stomach flipping and her heart crushing her ribs and fluttering, thrumming, pounding with more vigour and force than ever. Leia’s fingertips are on the side of Jyn’s neck, and she seems to know what Jyn wants before Jyn does.

Softly, Leia brushes her lips over Jyn’s cheek, and Jyn turns her head just slightly and catches the princess in a kiss so gentle that it’s only just there. There is a swelling inside her, a happiness and a fear that threatens to shut her down. It aches, settles in her chest and crushes her lungs, spreads to her heart and sets her veins on fire, sends warmth and fear and contentment and safety tearing through her, ripping her apart and reassembling her all over again. She grips Mothma’s hand as Leia kisses her, and she watches as Leia turns and kisses Mothma just as gently, just as sweetly, and she wishes that she could pause time right here and now and live in this moment forever.

Mothma is saying something, and it takes Jyn a few seconds to come back to them.

“Please be careful,” she’s whispering. “Please, Leia. Be careful.”

“I’ll see you soon,” Leia says quietly. “I’ll see you both soon.” She kisses Mothma again, and then Jyn, and steps back from them.

“May the Force be with you,” Mothma murmurs.

_ (“i am one with the Force”) _

“And also with you,” Leia returns, smiling, and then she’s walking away, and Jyn wants nothing more than for them to go with her, and protect her, but she knows - she believes more than she has ever believed in anything - that Leia can protect herself.

A few heavy moments of silence pass, until Mothma exhales unsteadily and shakes her head. “Jyn-”

Jyn turns and kisses her, holding her face gently with both hands. She kisses her and kisses her and she’s thinking of nothing but this. When they part, Mothma smiles, and her eyes are shining with tears.

“Can you forgive me?” she whispers, resting her forehead against Jyn’s and closing her eyes.

Jyn grazes the back of her knuckles over Mothma’s cheek gently and holds her close. “I stole the plans to the Death Star,” she murmurs. “I can do anything.”

_ (“the Force is with me”) _


End file.
